I’m not nervous about sales. Maybe it will flop. Maybe people will dig it. I hope for the best, but I’m not worried.

No, what has me worried are glitches. We’ve done as much testing as a small outfit like ours can hope to do. The press have been playing the game for a couple of weeks now. While everything is basically okay so far, I’m still terrified that some previously unseen glitch will pop up when the game reaches the masses. Maybe the framerate will be low for people using left-handed mice, or maybe the display colors will be inverted for people using DVORAK keyboards, or whatever. There was no shortage of mystery problems during development, and I can’t shake the feeling that a few of them have been hiding, waiting until launch day to manifest.

If I designed a bad videogame and it gets bad reviews, then that’s how it goes. But if I designed a good game that gets trashed in reviews because of some obscure but game-breaking glitch, it will haunt me forever.

I’m sure we’ll have more posts in this series. Maybe I’ll do a postmortem. Maybe we’ll talk about sales. I don’t know. We’ll see what’s interesting.

Thanks to Pyrodactyl for teaming up to finish the dang thing. Thanks to Arvind, Mikk, Rutskarn, and Ross for the hard work, long meetings, and good ideas. Thanks to everyone who’s followed the project since day one. Thanks for the encouragement. Thanks for taking a chance and buying the game. Thanks for doing all the social-media sharing stuff to help the game reach more people.

But a bonus for you–unexpected snag for us–is that for some reason, the launch was hinky in a few ways, among them being the game was discounted at 30% instead of the 10% we’d budgeted for. Steam Customer Support will presumably slouch into action before too long, but for now…I dunno. Know anybody ELSE who needs a copy of Good Robot?

EDIT: As of forty minutes from launch, the problem is fixed. Price is right, Robot is Good, page is here.

For me games usually release 1:00pm EST (my local time). So probably less than an hour?

Oh wait VR IS HERE. I’ll buy that instead! Hmm… *looks around room* Actually, that won’t work. Oh man, if only there was game where the protagonist is seen from a third person camera and you get to shoot lots of robots. I could simply use my imagination then! In fact, it would be super nice if I could play it on my craptop instead of being forced to upgrade to a newer computer! Also, it would be great if it didn’t cost hundreds of dollars! What? Good Robot is that game!?!

That settles it: Good Robot is better than VR. You may use that as a box quote.

I recently reread though some of your dev blogs for your older projects and then all of Good Robot’s, and I want to say thanks for all the great writing on the game development process. I have to admit, I don’t know as much about coding as a would like to(I feel like I only know about 75% of what I need to make something work), but your writing has really helped my understanding of how computer languages work.

I’ll be exited for whatever project you work on next Shamus! Also count me in for waiting to buy the game!

O-kay. After 1 PM hit it changed from “releases April 5” to “coming very soon.” Then I refreshed the page on Steam and it took me to the front page. Searching for Good Robot now brings it up in the drop-down as a free demo instead of $29.99 (which it had been showing due to the Pyrodactyl bundle). However, clicking it does nothing, and the above link also redirects to the front page.

I swear, I’m trying really hard to get rid of some of my money in your general direction. C’mon, Steam.

I have pleaded with all my twitter followers to check it out, if not buy it (I even linked the blog here cause I have a bunch of people who might not be interested in the game genre, but would hopefully be interested and support a game with fascinating blog articles about making it!).

Perhaps using the hashtag #GoodRobot would help too? I shall purchase later, the antibiotics and the bacteria in my GI tract have decided to escalate hostilities and I don’t want to risk my computer to ick. (by later I mean in a few hours, certainly today!)

OK, that was bizarre! – I think it probably was running all this time, but until I unplugged my XBox One controller I just got a small black window (entitled Good Robot v0.6.8Alpha) with no sound, so it appeared that nothing had loaded at all. This is on Windows 10 – as I say, with an XBox One wired controller previously plugged in. Errr, let me know if any other info about the setup would be useful.

PS If I plug the controller back in now that it’s running, it all seems to work fine.

Woop! Been waiting for a post about this, I checked Steam earlier and figured they hadn’t released it yet so I stuck it in my wishlist so that Steam would tell me when it was out. Gonna pop off and buy it in a mo, once I’m done with my work. :) Fingers crossed it does well for y’all, you deserve it!

Right-o, bought and installing. I picked it up in the Pyrodactyl bundle ‘cos I really like the sound of Unrest and figured why not? Hope that still counts as for the purposes of day-one sales and whatnot. :)

I received an email that it was available a few minutes ago, and I went right to Steam to purchase it. This was also when I found out that if you’re logged into the Steam desktop app, it offers to remotely install the game for you. So, with any luck, it’ll be ready to go when I get home from work in a few hours. My computer has been showing signs of Windows fatigue, though, so I don’t know how much I’ll be able to play it.

Start a game, pause and enlarge the window by dragging the corner. The in-game cursor will be stuck in the boundries of the game window’s original size (you can still leave the window entirely and reach the desktop). Going fullscreen will have the cursor stuck in a similar-sized boundary in the top-left.

Its also on the front page on Steam at the moment at the top of “Popular New Releases” in the bottom part of the page. So there’s that. :)

Bought it, downloaded and played 10 minutes already. Its cool looking. As for gameplay, I guess its like Hot Line Miami control wise (sites are calling it “twin stick shooter’) I stopped playing Hotline Miami mainly because I found this control scheme a little frustrating and the psychedelic aesthetic was a little unpleasant but so far Good Robot is more pleasing to look at in my opinion and that control scheme seemed to be plenty popular for lots of Hotline Miami fans so my own frustration with it shouldn’t be a barrier for others. Its very smooth.

Great job. Like the funny hats and breaking news too. Its been ten minutes so maybe I’ll have more to say later.

On the issue of fonts, when text wraps on the breaking news section, it bunches to the point of overlapping. It seems to be resolution related. I played on 2560 by 1440. At 1920 by 1080, the lines of text are close by not quite touching and at 1280, the spacing is fine. So the higher the resolution, the more the text bunches.

When I say “bunches” I mean the lines overlap. The kerning on individual lines was fine.

Nothing to stress over. I think we’ve all seen our share of font issues in games. I’m guessing you missed this because of your emphasis on “craptop” focused testing. This problem won’t show up on a craptop I’m guessing.

If I recall earlier discussions correctly, I think the team would prefer you buy on day 1 to try to push it higher in Steam’s hot stuff rankings. Increasing its visibility to the general public is worth a lot more than an extra 10% sale price.

As for me, I’m counting the hours until I can get home and start shooting up some bad (???) robots.

The special sixth item is different each time I access an upgrade station. Intentional? If I’m supposed to have access to all of these items from a single station, this seems like odd interface design.

Funny you should mention glitches, it took me 10s to find one (nothing serious, but the fullscreen checkbox doesn’t work with a controller). First impressions are good, but I’m getting pretty nasty screen-tearing and there’s no v-sync option. Am I missing anything?

I havent actually played the game yet. However it does have the alpha version number at the top of the window while in windowed mode. Hopefully its the latest version.
Random thought. In the credits page you should have linked the game creation blog series would have been interesting. I could actually see that kind of idea catching on for other games. About to jump in and waste the week away. On a side note because of the 30% discount I bought the sound track edition which I might not have gotten if it was more. I figured I was willing to pay $10 for the game I should.

So where can we report strange behavior. Had an interesting interaction with a shop.

Color seems to indicate difficulty of the robots, and the number of symbols seems to indicate the preference between lots of weaker bots, and fewer tougher bots. I don’t know yet if combinations such as red-six cube is possible, but I’m quite enjoying it so I’m sure I’ll figure out soon enough.

A bit of a tooltip description in the initial realm would be nice, but its not too difficult to intuit, especially if you just explore and experience. Big red box doors always got boss types in them. Guess its an exploration thing.

I think colors indicate game modes, instead of game difficulties: red is boss fights (I think plain square is standard and the one with “hands” moves you to the next level) green is standard, yellow $ has the containers, blue lightning bolt electrifies the walls–I haven’t figured out the rest, though. They’re different but I haven’t played enough to fully quantify it.

I think you’re right about the number–more robots on the icon does seem to give lots of small weak robots and fewer gives fewer strong ones.

– First off, controller support is weird. It feels like I have to press twice in any given direction to navigate up or down in the menus?

– Window was pretty small so the first thing I navigated to was graphics -> fullscreen. I was not able to check the fullscreen checkbox with gamepad, so I went for the mouse. That fullscreened the game.

– Menu is no longer responding to gamepad or keyboard input. The mouse cursor is stuck in the corners because the cursor sensitivity is completely off its rockers.

Been looking forward to the game basically since you first posted about development on it, too. :[

Where can I find the savefile for the game and revert the fullscreen thing?

There is a level with the lightning bolt door that has charged walls that will hurt you. The walls of most levels are harmless. Specifically it’s the level that has red walls that have electrical zaps discharging all around that are dangerous.

Bought it and played about 30 min. So generally not a fan of twin stick shooters, but this one is pretty intuitive to play and I really enjoyed the time so far. Controller worked fine but I found aiming with the mouse to be more precise.

Like the rebindable keys (although the current set up is fine with me) and the ability to save and exit (especially since I’m having a good run but needed to get back to work).

YES to rebindable keys. Tinkered with the game on my lunch (spoilers: I died). Wanted to say thank you for including rebindable keys, as I can do my right-hand-numpad/left-hand-mouse preferred style of gaming.

Congratulations on the release, but the game simply isn’t working for me. When I try to launch through Steam, it just sits on the “Preparing to launch Good Robot” pop-up, and also crashes Steam, and when I try to run the exe directly, it causes Windows Explorer to freeze. I also notice that when I try to run the game, for some reason it creates three processes called GoodRobot.exe, none of which can be ended via Task Manager and none of which appear to be doing anything (no CPU usage, and the memory usage doesn’t change).

Bought the game, loaded it up, go to change resolution and notice that the ‘back’ button flickers between having the little red B icon for an XBox 360 controller, and having nothing when I’m moving my mouse. I have no 360 controller plugged in, but I do have an X52 HOTAS plugged in. Additionally, when booting into the gameplay proper, the robot seems to go a bit crazy and fire and shift my viewpoint at random. Would all of this be caused by it picking up the X52 as a ‘controller’ and freaking out?

I have been reading this site for a few years now, but I rarely bother to comment on any sites. I’m not sure if the game is something I’ll like, but I’ve enjoyed reading about making it. At least by bying it I’ll support Shamus =) And hopefully I’ll also even like the game =P

Congratulations. I was so eager to buy it that I noticed the soundtrack edition only after purchase – no problem, just added the soundtrack “DLC”. :)

Okay first thing I notice, sadly, no borderless/fullscreen window. There is either a floating window with a border, or true fullscreen.

Edit: I noticed on my resolution (1920×1200 i.e. 16:10 aspect ratio) that sometimes the left or right edge of the map is slightly outside the visible area. When I can move to the actual border where I hit the wall, just the right arm of the robot is still visible.

If the game is crashing at launch, sometimes Steam doesn’t install the per-requisite setup files. Try opening the game’s folder (right click “Good Robot” in Steam library, properties, local files, browse local files). Open the “_CommonRedist” folder and install both the OpenAL and Visual C++ Redist setups. If that doesn’t fix it, verifying integrity of game cache never hurts, just in case.

I’ll make a discussion thread in the Steam forums where you can send me the details of your computers and stuff. Really sorry about the problems!

I got the problem that while the CommonRedists installed just fine, it crashed Steam in the process. Well, not really crashed, but it stopped responding, and the game didn’t have Overlay when it started. Had to restart Steam, now it works fine.

Do you have any particular location to send bug reports / typos / ideas?

Alright, bought it but can’t play. Controls are wonky.
If I’d had to guess I’d say the game either does not play nice with quadruple-head setups. Where do I send further info? Here? Steam User forums *shudder*? And no, I’m not returning the game. It’ll be patched before long, and I’m patient.

At first I was distraught because I had to head to campus just when the game was finally *technically* released… but then I remembered I have the Steam app on my tablet, so I can just buy it now and play it when I get home, and…

A soundtrack edition?! I love soundtrack editions!

Shamus & co., thanks for all your hard work. I look forward to playing this tonight (briefly… before getting back to work on my Erosion Control final project…).

Already found what I think is a bug after less than half an hour. Here’s what I think is a weapon pick-up… except I can’t pick it up. I don’t see its name and hitting Enter does nothing. This is the second time I’ve seen this happen in the same run.
Is there a log or something I can provide?

Also, I’m not a fan of the boss music continuing to play after you kill the boss.

Alternately, if the dice roll a weapon to spawn that you’ve currently got equipped, the game could just silently not spawn a weapon that time. Effectively it’d be the same, but one situation feels like a bug, and the other is invisible to the player.

By having played…20 minutes so far and being an instant pro I will say it LOOKS like the drop you’re trying to pick up is the same as the one you currently have (they’re both orange) so I’m assuming it doesn’t let you pick it up cause there would be no point. I don’t know if this is right though but would make sense in that if drops are randomized there would always be a chance of the one you already have dropping again.

Without sales tax it’s $8.99 + $4.49 versus $13.49. Which is still 1 cent more expensive to buy as a bundle, but in your case it’d be the weird way in which the tax is being calculated I’d guess. Specifically, the individual parts look to be taxed at 10%, but the bundle is taxed at a higher rate for whatever reason.

My only complaint is the fact that the bad robots can some times hide in the ground area, even when they are not worms.

That said within my first hour of playing I managed to make it to the top 20 in the global rankings. I managed to kill myself on the exploding disk weapon when testing the bounce. I love the bouncing weapons, they let me get through two levels of chapter 2 without losing my hat.

Will be sharing the game with my friends and get them to signal boost it out to their friends.

So, weird glitch for me. When I raise or lower the volume on my keyboard controls, it pauses and unpauses the game. Volume up pause, volume up unpause, etc etc. I’m using a logitec G15, with the current logitec software.

Picked up a couple copies; having a lot of fun so far, but I gotta go to work.

A few notes:

When using a controller, it doesn’t automatically highlight a menu option, requiring you to press a direction to get the game to recognize you are using a controller. It just feels slightly janky.

Also when using a controller there’s no way to control the camera without shooting, granted that’s not really too big an issue, given that you will be shooting pretty much all the time anyways, but on dark levels it can be a little frustrating.

I noticed that when exiting a shop the character is replaced in a sort of jump-cut; is there a reason for that? It doesn’t affect gameplay at all, just curious for the reasoning.

One thing gameplay wise that I find a bit frustrating is that some of the smaller robots can get hidden behind walls and in awkward places leading me to be trundling along and getting nicked by something there is no way I could have seen. (lost my hat… you monster.)

But yeah, fun stuff, going to go to work, then get home and shoot stuff.

It still shows for me, but then I bought a gift copy that’s sitting in my inventory so that makes sense. (I’m waiting for the Humble version for my own use, bought the Steam copy to help with this initial sales push)

To my very great relief, the game seems to run well under Linux, despite the lack of official support. For the record, I’m using PlayOnLinux to run the Steam client for Windows, as the Steam client for Linux (perhaps sensibly) will not allow you to install a Windows-only game. Keyboard and mouse work very well.

Controller input seems a bit odd, though. Please note that I’m not complaining (or demanding a bug-fix) as I am well aware that I am playing the game in an other-than-intended manner. Movement is fine, but weapons fire is erratic and semi-continuous. I may be simply misunderstanding how the gamepad controls are supposed to work. But putting the pad down and using the mouse or keyboard to input a command seems to restore normal function. I actually really, really like that the game lets you switch between controller and mouse & keyboard on the fly.

I guess I can make this a long post about my first hour with Good Robot?20:00 GMT+1: 700MB for the soundtrack edition, eh?While downloading:I’m gonna assume it’s not your fault that Steam’s prices are a complete mess20:10: It started just fine. It started windowed in 640×480, but starting without trouble puts it right above some AAA games released recently!20:13: “press return to take the phase cannon”.. The what now?20:15 OH, that ball-thingy is a weapon I can pick up!20:16: I’m already lost. Where’s the map button? *after checking the options menu* There isn’t one? How am I supposed to navigate this place?20:18: I appear to have made 968 credits on the first level and all upgrades cost 1000. That’s just mean. Now which of the three doors do I take?20:23: A phone call ended my first life after only 10 minutes actual playtime and 49 robots killed, 750 conflicts of interest and 1072 segmentation faults. I don’t think I was a very good robot.

Run two: The first enemy is nice enough to drop a Crystal Cannon, which fires three projectiles that bounce. The second one gives me an Argon Blaster to replace my other weapon with what appears to be the same thing with two projectiles. This is already more interesting!
I also found out the game doesn’t pause when you alt+tab. Goodbye, cruel world.

Run four: Exact same starting weapons, but I found an HE Grenade Launcher that was incredibly satisfying to use and a rocket launcher that I didn’t hit a lot with because I couldn’t get over the assumption that some of my momentum should translate to the rocket, but it doesn’t. Killed my first boss (take that, PyroCorp MascBot), who hid in what I wrongfully accused of being a level only containing two minor robots and a lot of empty space.
Have not figured out the doors yet, but died shortly after going one through one with a purple questionmark on it.

Run five: Will have to wait till tomorrow. So far Good Robot seems like something I can have a lot of fun with.

For prosperity: I played in 1080p fullscreen on Windows 10 Pro using an i7-6700k, GTX980 and 16GB RAM (Yes, I specifically build this machine to play 2D sidescrollers, why do you ask?). No stability problems, graphical glitches (that I noticed) or framerate drops (steam reported 60-61 at all times) in a whopping hour of playtime. Bethesda could learn from you.

Minor annoyance: Pre-destroyed “factories”/”spawners”/whatever often times appear lit up when they come into view in “fog of war” only to suddenly switch to their destroyed state when I shine my light on them.

Pet Peeve: Why isn’t the controller rebindable? And if it isn’t, why is it in the OPTIONS menu?

Those are “Argon Repeater” weapons, or something similar. Anyway, something Argon-related. Really nice, at least early on in the game. Do you already have that weapon equipped? It’s a three-in-one-blast laser weapon.

I am #235 on the global leaderboard. I keep losing my targeting cursor over at the side of the screen aiming through the enemy – a straight line (laser pointer) indicator would help…but I should get used to it eventually.

Is there a way to view the numeric values for my health & weapons? Is there a way to heal?

I like the sounds the robots make when they come in to view. It’s very Descent-like.

Yeah, I figured that out fairly quickly. Early on, it’s better to go for shield upgrades to heal when you can since repairing shields costs a bunch. Later on it tips back towards repairing, but all-in-all shields are good to invest in.

It entirely depends on how good you are at it. Ross, who is the best in the team at the game, can beat the game in about 3 hours. I can beat it in about 4.5 hours. Both of us have hundreds of hours of practice in the game though, and we know the game inside out.

Assuming you’re lucky, I’d say you should beat the game in about 10-12 hours (this isn’t a single playthrough, but more like you-learn-and-get-better-over-multiple-playthroughs type thing). It really depends on the player though.

Don’t ask me how, because I honestly don’t know. It IS quite a challenging game, and there were several points where I was sure I wasn’t going to make it (including at least once where a hat was all that was between me and death).

Hmm, the leaderboards appear to not work at all for me. In the local ones, I’m merely entered as “Player” instead of my Steam username. And the global leaderboards simply stay completely empty, no matter which page I’m on.

Oh, also, the achievements are completely broken for me. Looking at their descriptions (buy a hat, open the options menu, buy an upgrade, repair yourself, clear level 1…), I should have quite a few of them. But, in fact, I have none.

Edit: And the Lord said: “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” And lo, it was so.
Yeah, for some reason, a restart of Steam fixed both of these problems. Sorry!
Still, I’m gonna leave this here in case others have the same issue.

Bug report time! Two minor ones I’d noticed – the fullscreen toggle doesn’t work when selected with a controller in the options menu (I think someone might have mentioned it before)

And really really tiny – the buttons at the bottom of the credits screen (because I totally needed to confirm that you are who you say you are), on a controller they cycle with up and down rather than left and right (which, given their position on the screen, is confusing).

I imagine that, as this blog might appeal to the more technically minded among us, and we’re gonna be here looking to “help” (by finding horrific and terrible bugs), is there an appropriate place to direct such things?

As I stated in another thread before, I won’t buy Good Robot on Steam (I’m really sorry but there’s no way around it), but I really wish you success and great sales, also hoping to be able to buy the game once it finally hits gog.com or another DRM-free platform.

Steam does not mandate DRM and indeed lots of games are sold on Steam completely DRM free (example: Kerbal Space Program). I just checked and the game does indeed work without Steam running, so you would only need it for the download. Plus, given Shamus’ overall stance on DRM’s futility, why would he even include Steam DRM when he has the option not to?

But we know from Arvind* already that it will be released on other platforms as a pure DRM-free download sometime later, so conversely there’s no reason to buy on Steam’s semi-DRM free implementation (needing the Steam client to download) for those who feel strongly about it.

Personally I bought a copy just to help out the guys, but if it were any other game, knowing that it’d be released on a better platform later on, I’d wait 100% of the time.

* From one of the previous blog post discussions, it won’t be on GOG but should be available on Humble Store and itch.io at the very least in DRM-free downloadable form.

I used to have a similar stance, although mine was if I was getting a game on Steam it’d have to be cheap (justify the purchase if I only get to play it once due to Steam going out of business).

That said, I’ve come to prefer Steam for one feature, cloud saves. It’s saved me a couple of times to not have to worry about backing up my saved games and so any game that supports it I’ll get on Steam.

Having a blast with this game! You guys really nailed the “Crap I died….ah one more try won’t hurt” approach. I’d like a way to better track my progress through the game to know how far I’ve gotten, though (like a quick progress-bar type thing that flashes up whenever you start a new level).

I use a dual Monitor setup with my primary being a 1920×1080 and my secondary one an old 1280×1024 screen. When I go on fullscreen in 1080p, the game stretches over to the second monitor and the mouse acts all wonky…

I really like how it turned out. Hadn’t have much time to play it, yet, but love it so far.

But I would really like to be able to play it with a controller instead of Mouse and Keyboard, but it doesn’t seem to work correctly with a Dualshock 4. Buttons are mapped strangely (e.g. Square is Select, R2 is Menu), but that might be intentional. A real problem is that I am unable to aim correctly. The neutral orientation of the richt stick is apparently registered as being ‘left’, so my robot is always shooting to the left, and I can only aim up or down, which results in the robot shooting at an angle of 45Â° at most. Pushing left on the right stick fires the secondary weapon.

One more thing: I’d prefer it, if I were able to see at a single glance if a pick-up is a primary or secondary weapon, before picking it up. They look identical (at least to me).

Bought, installed and running fine. I’m rubbish at it, but still enjoying myself.

Only minor problem I’ve come across was the very top of one of the levels seemed to be above the edge of the screen (full screen 1920*1200), so the robot could go partially off screen. Only seen it happen once so far though.

Edit: Got the same issue again. Don’t know if it’s any help, but screenshot is here.

It turns out I’m not going to be able to play Good Robot any more, although it’s not the game’s fault.

A few weeks ago I tried to get back into Terraria and found out that my eyes are apparently developing problems as I get older. The strain of constantly trying to make things out in partial darkness would cause my vision to get blurry and eventually even cause my eyes to hurt. I had to give it up. Good Robot is the second game to have that effect on me and after my first couple of runs I suddenly noticed I had badly blurred vision again. So barring a graphics overhaul mod that fixes this I’m afraid I’m already done.

That said, from the playtime I had it seems like a fun game and I’m looking forward to seeing what Shamus and company come up with next. And as a long-time fan of Shamus I’m going to pass on getting a refund to support his continued work.

Just one question, though: how do I get the soundtrack? I purchased it but I don’t know how to download it from Steam.

The game is pretty open to modding. Most definitions are in text form (XML etc.), assets are plain images files, so in principle someone should be able to modify the files into a colour scheme more friendly to your condition.

You have to buy the privilege of restarting from a checkpoint. This is called a warranty and can be purchased at red vending machines. To respawn, you just, well, get destroyed. You can also buy a full heal at red vending machines, but buying a Shields upgrade at the blue vending machines also fully heals you.

I played around for a while, but I haven’t spotted a red vending machine. Only ones for upgrades & hats (blue and yellow I think?). So all I could do was restart at the beginning at each time I died.
That’s a bit crappy to be honest. Something like that ought to be at a fixed place, for example at the start of the level.

I don’t know whether I’m more disappointed at the lack of proper saving functionality, or at the fact that I only got to enjoy my amazing, sweet top hat for about half a minute before some bad robots shot me.
…
Definitely the latter. I’m still mourning that loss. It was a really good top hat.

I think I found a bug. I had 18$ went to hat vending machine (hoping to see pope hat) but couldn’t buy any of the hats. Went and killed some things, came back to the vending machine with 238$ but I still can’t buy any hats. This isn’t like when you buy a hat then come back and get the save some for others message, this is I can still see the hats with prices but there’s no buy button.

It actually extends to other things as well. Went to a PyroCorp Weapon Store before triggering a boss to repair (I had a warranty already active) and I then proceeded to die to the boss. I then went back to the Weapon Store to repurchase a warranty and the store said my warranty was active and wouldn’t sell me one.

It’s being released on Steam first because first-day sales on Steam are really important in terms of creating marketing buzz and so having it sold elsewhere would lower its visibility on Steam and result in fewer total sales. It should be available elsewhere soonish.

1. I could only enable fullscreen using the mouse, not with the controller. To be precise: I selected the option and pressed A. As a result, the screen would briefly flash to full and then back to windowed. When clicking with the mouse, it worked as expected.
2. The tutorial button prompts are missing the actual button names. E.g. it tells me to “Press to take the ballistic missile”. If I use the keyboard, it works, but not with my controller.

I have a wireless Xbox 360 controller, using the normal MS drivers, on Windows 7 Professional 64 bit.

Let me know if I can provide you with any more information that might help!

I’m not normally a twinsticks type guy (Playing this with KB-Mouse actually), and not a big “bullet hell” type guy either. Yet… This is actually pretty good.

Like, I intended to give it a buy 100%, Shamus has entertained me enough here for me to give his game a try, and now its definitely staying in my library. Something about it just leads me to grin as a zip about blowing up bad robots. It feels so… Solid. Like, the shooting is satisfying, the impact sounds, the explosions, the charge ups. I do wish a few of the attack types were more visually distinct against the background, a few of the pale blue attacks blend into the blue realms and so forth, but otherwise its satisfying.

And argon blaster plus crystal cannon OP, I can fill the sky with death in seconds and then duck into cover.

Major issue I’m having is that enemies don’t seem to aggro or shoot at you if they’re not on screen. Since all weapons seem to have infinite range, this means if you just blanket the areas you’re moving into with fire you can kill a ton of stuff before you even see it. I just killed a boss this way without it even shooting at me.

Also a lot of first chapter enemies have green bullets, while cash is the same shade of green. It’s visually confusing when you mix colours that represent good stuff with colours that represent bad stuff. Maybe make them different shades of green?

Major issue I'm having is that enemies don't seem to aggro or shoot at you if they're not on screen. Since all weapons seem to have infinite range, this means if you just blanket the areas you're moving into with fire you can kill a ton of stuff before you even see it. I just killed a boss this way without it even shooting at me.

Funny, I feel the opposite about this and love how projectiles go on and do damage beyond the screen’s edge.

I find it kind of boring when 90% of enemies just die without even appearing on the screen. You start taking tons of damage if you get hit in the later levels, so it’s best to just hose down the area ahead of you with shots and kill almost all the enemies before they have a chance to fire. It’s a simple and effective strategy that provides maximal gain for minimal effort and minimal risk. Since this game has permadeath, it heavily rewards low-risk strategies. I haven’t played a lot of twinstick shooters, but I have played a bunch of Roguelikes, and the least risky strategy is almost always the winning play.

I’ve since figured out that shots do eventually hit a maximum range, but it’s so long for most of the good weapons that it doesn’t really matter. The weapons that have very low ranges, like the autoshotgun, are basically useless because of that low range. Additionally, a bunch of the secondary weapons can bounce off of walls and hit you for tons of damage. This makes them risky, and therefore not useful.

I just cleared level 5, on my third try, and the game is getting kind of tedious.

Oooooh – this is fun! Even though I suck at navigating around the level because I tend to run into stuff.

My first run lasted 32 minutes. I was able to buy a better shield and faster weapons. I blew a lot of green bad robots to pieces until I encountered a worm. Still trying to navigate around the things it threw at me I somehow managed to run straight into it after a while. It died, I lived. The fun ended when some rather mean red spiders defied my plasma, cornered me and lit up my poor little good robot with a handful of rockets. I will be back with more plasma! Death to the spiders!

The game is incredibly fun! I am looking forward to spend some time with it on the weekend.
The only thing that irks me so far is aiming. I am playing with a controller. Hitting enemies left and right of me works just fine, but aiming up or down is another story. I am having quite some difficulties destroying enemies above or below me. My guess is the reason for this is that the robot fires from its arms/hands/shoulders directly at the crosshair. This works well when aiming with the mouse because you can just point to wherever you’d like to fire. When using the controller the distance between to crosshair and the robot is fixed though and when firing up/down my shots cross each other at the position of the crosshair and end up not going where I was aiming.

On another note: Definitely enjoying this! I really like the art style, the whole light cone view thing, and the screen tilt all look and feel great.

I found it a bit strange initially that the right stick is firing and looking around at the same time, could be nice to have an option to change that at some point in the future. I think I can get used to it, though.

I’m curious to learn what the different colored symbols on the doors mean, so far my guess is different level of difficulty?

I was also a bit confused for a moment that I could not pick up a weapon, until I realized I already had the same one. Maybe some visual feedback could help here – OTOH, I think once you learn how it works, it’s totally fine.

If you’re still confused, (I’m not sure about the colours yet):
Yellow $: Level contains lots of money crates. But some contain robots instead!
Single square-with-eyes: Mini-boss
Large robot symbol: End-of-stage boss
Up arrow: After a boss – next stage
Lightning: Level has electrified walls that hurt you if you bump them. I don’t know what bonus you get from this.
Thing that looks like a circuit board: Level is a maze, with narrow corridors.

The game is a lot of fun – I think it will perfectly fill a hole in my library of “I want to spend 15 minutes shooting stuff, without worrying about story and stuff.”

A question for people who have played twin-stick shooters in general – is it normal that you shoot when you adjust your aim? That feels really weird to me. Not that I care much – keyboard and mouse is perfect for me, since it matches Terraria (only Good Robot has flying. And robots. And a bonnet.).

I actually tried to cheat by using controller-left-stick in my left hand to gain precision in movement, but kept aiming with my mouse. But I was foiled – as soon as you touch the controller, the aim goes back to wherever the controller-right-stick pointed last.

Only on level 3 so far – but good work to all the people/robots who made it!

Wondering if there are plans for a OS X version? You’ve talked about Linux support, and as I understand it, getting there is halfway to getting it to run on OS X. (Also, OS X is a considerably more… unified platform thanks to the Glorious People’s Benevolent Dictatorship of Apple)

Sorry – having Xbone Wireless Control issues. Right stick doesn’t aim where right stick is pointing – and is stuck in top hemisphere. Then if I push RT, it aims down (with right stick still not pointing quite where aimed).

Does the “Hattiquette” achievement work on the prologue chapter? ’cause I just bought a Top Hat at the start of it, played through it without getting hit and did not get the achievement.
Is this intentional (because the prologue is comparatively easy) or a bug?

Edit: Okay, it does work on the prologue level. However, I didn’t get the achievement immediately after finishing the level, but once I killed the first enemy in the next level. That seems a bit odd. I wonder what would have happened had I gotten hit by it?

Made two runs so far. On the first one, when I died the end screen showed up immediately, on the second when dying to a missile I got a death animation first. Not sure if that’s a bug or if bullets don’t give death animations.

As the proud owner (for now) of the #6 spot on the leaderboards, WOW is there a jump in lethality on levels 5 and 6. Worms are crazy to fight.

I kinda wish I knew how much the blue shop upgrades actually increase your stats. Since the weapons only seem to deal damage in whole number values (please correct me if they are invisibly doing the fractional part as well) I don’t want to drop 15-20k on a firepower increase if it winds up wasted on a low base damage minigun for example, because it wasn’t enough to bump the gun up to the next whole number value.

Also, there isn’t a clear tell as to whether an explosion is damaging. The rocket and missile weapons (unsurprisingly) deal self damage, but the launchers (HE grenade, the three grenade charge whatever its called) don’t appear to? The explosions on a boss death are purely cosmetic but the explosion from a spawner dying knocked my hat off. There’s only so many sources of explosions in the game, so its not a huge hassle to learn what does what through trial and error, but the visual language isn’t consistent as to what means ‘damaging’ versus ‘cosmetic’ with regards to explosions.

I give that a couple hours at most to get topped though, and very little hope of staying high long term. I just shot more robots than the others by intentionally choosing doors with more robots (gotta get that money for upgrades somewhere). My combo counter skills are weak.

On another note, holy rotary cannon Batman! That thing has some hilarious recoil.

Just bought the soundtrack edition less than an hour ago! Excited to play it, as soon as I get the technical issues (probably caused by my multi-monitor + steam link setup — already filed a bug thread for it) sorted out.

Fun game so far. Reminds of some old school games we used to play on Windows 95 like Crazy Gravity (though that one didn’t involve shooting.)

Odd bug I ran into. Game starts in windows mode really small, but easily resizable, so far so good.

But for some reason on the menus, I can only access the Quadrant II (Cartesian) on the screen. Otherwise it jumps my mouse out of game screen and onto the desktop outside. I can navigate with arrow keys mostly. But when I die neither Retry nor Menu is in Quadrant II and are accessible and arrow keys won’t hop to Retry or Menu.

Piloting the robot works perfectly fine and is super fun. (I was afraid all those wall would blow me up and I’m happy that is not the case. Reckless driving :) )

edit.

Okay. Now on this play through I do not have this issue at all. Gah :( Inconsistent problem are the worst, but at least it’s running wonderful now .)

I have some bugs, which I’m pretty sure are not your fault, but rather to be attributed to the notoriously spotty OpenGL support, of my ancient, Q45 graphics chipset.

Specifically, I can’t see the Good Robot, or any Bad Robots, or any bullets, or any vending machines, or any factories.

I can see the cone of light, the walls, the shadows, the HUD, the numbers and the glowy effects that surround bullets, though. So I can tell where I am and have a good idea where I do/Don’t want to be, but it is tricky shooting invisible robots. They seem to get knocked about randomly every time I hit them, so I have to hunt them down over and over again, based on where the shots are coming from.

I’m not sure it would be humanly possible for you to fix this, without replacing my graphics card for me.

I guess my current game-breaking bug is my favorite I’ve read about so far. No robots.

To be specific, neither the sprite for the good robot nor for any other robots shows up. The sprite for my shots also seems absent, but the glowing trails exist. Other robots are similarly missing visually, but they can shoot at me. It’s also EXTREMELY slow to run.

I’m playing through a Windows VM on my mac, so probably a bug in my setup. :)

Shamus wrote the following on the very first Good Robot post (aka post #2) on Aug 19, 2013:

Usually in the programming projects I'm reluctant to talk about gameplay or influences. I don't want to answer a bunch of questions about things I haven't even designed yet. Is there a limit to how many dots this Pac guy can eat? Can he shoot the ghosts? Does the player have to be yellow, or can we configure our color? Can I play as a girl? Will there be DLC hats? Will there be a power pellet that lets you bash through walls? Shouldn't the ghosts stop chasing the player and try to steal the fruit? Will we get a sprint button for getting out of tight situations? Eventually you end up with other people trying to design your game through the art of passive-aggressive suggestions.

Slight issue, can’t get the game to work on my Kindle :) Throw another reason for me to build a new machine on the pile. Bought a copy for my little bros and shilled to my mates, for whatever that’s worth.

– Some guns seem to be dropped, but can’t be picked up. I just killed the QC worm, and it dropped an orange globe, which had the weapon sound effect, but I can’t use it.

– I would enjoy upgrade stations being more prevalent. I played through a part of the prologue, around six sections, and four of them had no upgrade stations. I was killed with about 12,000 unspent credits.

Figuring out what the symbols mean is part of the game and deliberately not pointed out in the game. But yes, I think you’re spot-on.

A red square with eyes means miniboss.
A red square with angry eyes and two flunkies means a proper boss.
A green square, a vertical line and an upward arrow indicates a level where you must destroy most bad robots to open up the exit.
A lightning indicates a level with electrified walls which are horrible!
The yellow $ symbol is a level with loads of boxes containing money and/or low-level enemies.

Not sure on all the combinations of squares, though. There’s three green ones, loads of green ones, some… purple ones, I think? Not sure. I’m gonna guess that green means easier enemies, though.

About the guns that can’t be picked up, I had the same confusion. That’s simply because you already have that gun equipped.

Ya I think green means easy enemies with 6 enemies on it meaning smaller variants but more of them compared to 3 enemies on it meaning larger forms (don’t quote me on that). Then I think purple means more powerful enemies than green. I just don’t know what the squares connected by lines means.

Also since I’ve seen some people doing it at launch I made it to 14 on leader boards, currently sitting at 25.

I think the six squares just means *more* enemies, not necessarily weaker ones, making the three green squares your ‘normal’ room. The purple room is extra dark. In order to see other robots you need to shine your brighter forward light cone on them. I think the question mark door just picks a type at random but I’m really not sure.

I’m doing my part and promoting it to all my Windows-using friends. I can’t buy it right now, though; I want to be absolutely certain Steam counts me as a Linux sale, because otherwise I’m just part of the problem.

Alright, I bought the game as soon as I saw the post in the website. I installed it and ran it. Unfortunately, I don’t have sprites for my or the other robots. I’m attributing this to the Intel HD graphics card from my Notebook, which is… well, I guess you know how these “cards” are.

Unfortunately, that means I won’t be able to see the game for a while, since my desktop PC is broken. :(

So far I’ve been enjoying the game. I was worried that it would be a very twitchy bullet-hell sort of game, and while there is elements of that, patience and using LOS to your advantage is key. My real problem so far is that I got to the fourth level, and I just randomly exploded. Like, there was nothing around me I just exploded. There is obviously something I missed but it was way too subtle for me to notice.

I bought it yesterday, played until my first death, shrugged and went on to do something else. Didn’t think much of it. Then I woke up this morning and played it again. And I’ll probably do it again tonight etc. It has that super elusive quality of being low-commitment. No, feeling low-commitment. And that means coming back to it again and again. Also, RIVET GUN!!

And now for the weird stuff. There are factories break the moment I get near. It seems they either should be broken, but get spawned as working or they should be lit up, but spawn with like 0 health?

Also, framerate dropped by half when trying to do a high resolution window. Not sure if that’s my laptop being its usual weird self or the game’s fault. In this same category – the game crashed this morning for no apparent reason. Couldn’t alt-tab to actually see the error message, so I clicked randomly and it closed. *shrug*

Regarding the factories, and I actually don’t like how this is handled and would like them to maybe try revisiting this mechanic, each room in the zone seems to have a certain number of robots allocated to it to spawn from factories inside that room. When you get close enough to an active factory in the room, It’ll just start dumping out robots at an absurd rate. Once the room is out of robots to dump, any more factories you go near just turn off because there is nothing to spawn. Some of the rooms (especially in the earlier levels) don’t get any robots to spawn from their factories and so they just all turn off.

So, feedback (Long Post Warning). I’m square in your target demo of people who like Shamus, people who like procedural generation, and people who like perma-death rogue-likes/rogue-lites/PDLs/Have-we-stopped-arguing-over-what-to-call-them-yets. Skill level: I can beat binding of isaac if I get a decent set of powerups, but a true blue bullet hell would grind me into dust. I also recognize that at this point, some of these things are immutable, but I’m big on context.

Minor Annoyances:
– Enemies tend to hide in the floor decoration, which means you can be attacked from behind from things you legitimately couldn’t see. Minor Annoyance and a good way to ruin someone’s hat run.
– Would be nice if there were a visual indicator if you’ve bought a hat on this level yet or not.
– Having to right-click continuously to keep firing secondary weapon.
– Perhaps change identical weapon drops to a lower tier/different same tier just so you don’t see your current weapons drop 3 or 4 times in a row (my record is 6 between primary and secondary).
– Occasionally there’s no outer edge, which makes it look like you can fly up, but invisible wall.

Visual Noise, Degenerate Strategy, & Other Issues
– Money needs to be a color that is not a danger color.
– Damage numbers are somewhat superfluous (and visual noise to boot) as all I care about is the number of hits it takes to kill things. Going from 4 to 6 is huge but 6 to 8 means nothing if the enemy has 12 hp (which is hidden from the player to boot, so they have no context on if +2 damage is going to make a difference in their play).
– Lasers are too easy to not notice. Green lasers especially fade into the background/visual noise.
– Lasers and Missiles need to be easier to differentiate. Especially since red on lasers means nothing but red on missiles means homing. This needs two different movement reactions but it is very hard to tell at a glance which is which.
– Is money supposed to despawn? I honestly can’t tell for onscreen money if I’m gobbling some up, it’s despawning, or it’s getting blown up. I’ll find money from destroyed robots from rebound shots way offscreen minutes later.
– I lost several good robots to factories spawning in 4 or 5 shotgun guys and them immediately firing at close range.
– I lost several good robots to enemies who were activated in other tunnels onscreen, then bunched up and opened up the second I went around the corner with undodgeable shots.
– Offscreen enemies are easy to cheese. You back off and fire without reprisal. This is especially egregious with bosses as you can see when you hit. Bouncing fire makes this even more abusable.
– There is no incentive to dogfight and no disincentive to playing it safe.
– I need a map. The featureless constant mazes makes getting lost easy and some of the levels are quite large. You have no move weighting or indication either. In spelunky I might not know exactly where the exit is, but I know it’s downwards and I can work on my risk/reward decision making from there. What made me stop playing was entire minutes of nothing happening as I bumbled around.

Money & Economy
– Why do hats cost money? The amount is incredibly inconsequential. There’s never a time where you don’t buy a hat. If it’s for the joke of selling hats to robots/hat market, then double down, have ‘rare’ or ‘iconic’ etc etc hats randomly that retail for 100x their normal price and function exactly the same.
– Buying Primary/Secondary Weapons seems like a waste of good money.
– Laser Sight: I have a perfectly good crosshair already, and it didn’t have any noticeable effect. Was still suffering from spread that caused it to go off of the laser line, further reducing usefulness. Would actually want a secondary shot guide for curved shots or multi-projectile targeting.
– Enemy Detector: More of an enemy tagger, which doesn’t help you against the unseen shotgun brigade that’s active around the corner. I also found the icons a little small.
– Compass: Either encourages skipping your good content, or makes your getting lost downtime slightly less bad. The player should not be spending resources to make your game more enjoyable.
– Cash Magnet: Might have minimal value if I thought I was losing cash to despawning.
– Attack Damage/Attack Speed. Unfortunately you have to choose based on your current weapon, which may not be super useful for your next weapon, but solid.
– Move Speed/Shield Upgrade. Solid to dump points into.
– View Distance. Bought the first rank, didn’t notice any difference; I assume the flashlight was a few degrees wider. Was hoping for a zoom out.
– The ramping costs for upgrades encourages min-max cheesing and in no way causes interesting choices. Going armchair dev, I’d much rather have 2 upgrade slots per upgrade type with much more noticeable effects and have the bosses drop an upgrade module. Keep the warranties ramped, have shield repairs fixed cost say 1000 but only usable once per machine, and balance money on warranties vs useful passives vs powerful weapons.

Main Point/TLDR:
– The game has a lack of any momentum and risk/reward and encourages min/max play-it-safe cheese with the ramping upgrade costs. I wanted to like it, and when there’s enough stuff on screen and you aren’t cheesing with the offscreen stuff it was enjoyable, but there was too much downtime and wandering lost around identical mazes looking for the exit.

And now, because this was an entire post of griping, the following:
– The soundtrack is pretty great, even if I occasionally feel the pavlovian response to switch to firefox and close the diecast tab.
– The visuals are solid, weapons are varied and feel good, and I didn’t notice movement at all (which means you did it right).
– You have a game released. On steam. Currently in the #1 popular new releases slot. Congratulations.

– I agree that is often difficult to even notice enemy shots, often times I suddenly lost my hat without even knowing what hit me.

– I agree about secondary weapons, I would love if they could also auto-fire when you hold the button down. Some of these have rather fast refire rates, especially with upgrades, so it’s just constant clicking.

– I also agree that enemies hiding in the wall geometry or coming around the corner to wtfpwn you in your face is annoying. Both might be intentional however.

– I disagree about “cheesing offscreen enemies”. I genuinely enjoy that, and would be severely disappointed if that were removed somehow. I am not that good at this type of bullet hell game so close quarters dogfighting usually gets me killed pretty quick, so here I finally have a game where I can rely on range, kiting and sniping.

-View distance upgrades do indeed zoom further out. It’s quite noticable if you compare the default zoom level and 3 or 4 points into the upgrade.

Some ad hoc extra feedback from me:

– Fighting “uphill” is annoying. Dead enemies fall down to you, so not only do you have to watch out for bullets, missiles etc. coming from above, but also differentiate that from the harmless visual debris. Couple that with money drops and you have a lot of visual clutter in that situation. I’d prefer if the debris would instead tumble only a bit before disintegrating, and not falling down.

– Not a fan of the escalating cost for repairs and warranties. While I see the point for warranties, for repairs it actively discourages using it and instead using the full repair you get when you buy a shield upgrade, or repair as lately as possible. I’ve also found that the further you get (and upgrade), the cost significantly eats into your savings. I must admit however that I am generally a fan of regenerating shields and/or health in games, so I am never keen about spending money or other finite resources to heal up. I’d love some sort of limited passive health regeneration, for example by default it only regenerates you to 25% max health if you are below that, and spending money on upgrades for that (i.e. new upgrade type) increases that threshold up to 50% of max health, so that the full repair for money would still retain have its usefulness.

– Sometimes I find the targeting reticule gets a bit lost in the clutter. Not sure how, but I’d appreciate if it were more noticable.

I also didn’t know whether the cash magnet actually ‘does’ anything because I couldn’t tell whether cash ever despawned. But at 500, I just took it for convenience anyway.

I actually liked the targeting laser, not because it did anything on its own, but because it helped me find my cursor on the screen, which is usually a problem for me with these sorts of deals.

I found the enemy detector very useful, essentially removing the blind corner threat and saving my life many times.

Compass is nigh useless, strip it and add a map if at all possible. Preferably a map you don’t have to buy, but I don’t care overmuch so long as it exists.

I repaired most of my light to moderate dings in the early game by purchasing shield upgrades instead of health costs to keep the price sane in the late game. It works well enough but sorta shoehorns you into buying shields over other things.

Had no idea that view range actually expanded screen area though I did find that I definitely wanted more. Beat the game with no view increases.

Found out (too late) that not having enough movement speed combined with too much fire rate makes some of the end tier guns … interesting to use. I guess this is intentional behavior? I kinda wish that I could sell some of my existing upgrades (at a loss in value if you must) so that I could shift some points around when things like that come up, but the game is just short enough that it works as is.

Didn’t have a problem with the hats as implemented (price, mechanics, whatever). If you ever add more hats in a patch, I will consider that a fulfillment of the ‘hats DLC’ joke whether you want me to or not.

A lot of the upgrades don’t make a big enough change per upgrade level to be really noticeable. They make a difference in aggregate but there’s no ‘oh boy, an upgrade!’ moment that you get with some games like these(rogue inspired whatevers I mean). I don’t know if that’s a problem on its own, but it lead (along with health costs) to a lot of dumping cash into shields because there is clear feedback that its helpful.

Its in another comment somewhere, but those factories dictated how I went through the game. Especially on the worm zones, every time it looked like I was coming to a room transition, I would find a corner to cheese the factory spawns with. Maybe lower the rate and make the factories more sparse? Additionally, they seem to be on a different parallax layer? As you fly by they look like they’re sliding across the ground slightly which is a little odd.

The bosses were good, mostly. Fire distributor just seemed to be a damage sponge. If there was a trick to it, I didn’t see it. With how I was methodically clearing levels, the bosses were some of the only times I actually had to get out into the middle of the room and dogfight.

Fun weapons, nice variety. I avoided anything with gravity like the plague. Not really your fault, just that I’ve been playing Starward Rogue lately and a lot of that practice carries over … until the gun you’re aiming with launches something that travels in a parabola. The trend of ‘this gun is that gun… but BETTER’ got a little stale. I assume it was in there because you needed to give the player a power increase that wasn’t dependent on their stat allocation, and also to add more shiny things to find. The red vendors did stock the next ‘tier’ of gun (I have no idea how you guys organized them internally) before they really started dropping from robots, so I did wind up using those.

On that note, played pretty much exclusively with ballistics. Need to try a run with a primary that can’t shoot down missiles, see how that affects the difficulty.

Add an autofire toggle for secondaries or make it the default behavior. Or maybe beef them up some and add an ammo cost if you want them to be slow? It would give robots something other than cash to drop occasionally. I can’t remember if Shamus ever wrote about having a build like that. Disregard if you already discarded the idea I guess.

Gravity didn’t seem to add much to the experience. Honestly the whole thing almost felt underwater at times (fish level certainly had fun with that feeling). The areas could maybe use some sort of level specific environmental hazards? Aside from the electric wall zones.

Overall, lots of cheesing robots around corners to avoid getting a face full of lasers while cool music played. (Those 9 shot volley laser fish are terrifying.)

I like it, but the economy/upgrades seem sort of borked to me. I constantly find myself either upgrading my shields (just to refill them) or spending so much money on repairs at the end of a level that I can’t afford anything else.

It seems like the game really does not like it when you play with mouse+keyboard but have a controller plugged in. Not sure if it’s an issue with needing a slightly large dead zone or what, but it jumps around something fierce when the controller is untouched on the desk beside me.

Not even sure if I want it and I have way too many games that I want to play, but I’ll buy it out of principle.

Edit: Seems quite neat, but if I have one issue, it is that enemy bullets are way too invisible. They need to be big, and bright, and obvious. Dodging is fun, being killed by tiny invisible darker shades of background color is really dumb.

I would love more cosmetic clutter on the screen (debris and lights and smoke and stuff), and if the enemy bullets had Z buffer priority (always on top) and were BRIGHT AND BIG AND YELLOW or RED then that would not make the game harder, only prettier.

Right now I feel the clutter is kept low because it’s really difficult to see bullets. Shmups need visible bullets, there’s a reason every new shmup has BRIGHT YELLOW / PINK bullets of gigantic size.

Congratulations on the Steam release, it’s a really good game. I had to do a bit of tweaking with graphics options to get the screen working properly (as I had to do for some other games) but it’s proved well worth the wait and the effort. Six hours in and I’ve got a good idea of how to get through the trainer levels and the first three ‘worlds’. Seaworld looks like a bit of a challenge however..!

Can you approach some of the more well known LPers like DanNerdCubed, ManyATrueNerd, Jesse Cox etc and see if they’ll give you a twenty minutes LP to get the word out? It was a shame that Steam did that VR thing with zero notice limiting your chance to get on the front pages. I think if you get some favourable YouTube footage you’ll get a game playing audience seeing it working, which is all the better.

Toss them some Steam codes. I think it’s both very playable and different to what’s out there, and that’s a good angle for an LPer.

I got the game, having fun with it, but man I SUUUUUCK. Have yet to make it more than 6 minutes into the game before blowing up. I have mad “dodge directly into the enemy fire” skills.

I’m running Windows 10 and I’ve had one mystery crash, but otherwise runs fine. It was a bit awkward at first because the game didn’t start in fullscreen and it wouldn’t let me move the mouse outside of the tiny window even though I maximized it, but I figured out how to change the settings okay.

Congrats on the release! I bought it, played it, finished it and reviwed it. And found a glitch. Sorry lol. But it’s a fun and not game-breaking. I already described it on steam forum and someone (Arviind?) already replied.

If you’re curious, if you get killed while exiting the level you respawn at the next level as if you just used a warranty, with full shield. It’s very hard to reproduce! I got it by having a seeking missile chase me. In fact, it’s so hard to exploit it that if you manage to use that to replenish your shields you deserved it.